Maria

Maria has been a pioneering trans activist in Sweden and around the world for many years. She talks about some of her more challenging moments growing up and going on to spearhead some of the ground breaking shifts in human rights for trans people.

Maria’s story is one of a series of stories collected at the Moving Trans History Forward Conference, put on by the Transgender Archives at the University of Victoria in March of 2016. MTHF graciously allowed onmyplanet.ca to record stories on site during the conference.

(Early in the video Maria likens a Swedish psychologist that she saw as a child to prominent Canadian psychologist Ken Zuker (Psychologist-in-Chief, and Head of the Gender Identity Service at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health for many years) who was of the opinion that gender non-conforming children should wait till the age of 18 to make a decision about their gender – forcing them to live as their assigned gender until then.)